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AttoPilot review, Part 1: The PCB board

Posted by Chris Anderson on April 2, 2009 at 11:39pm

I just got an AttoPilot in and plan to review it in several parts. Today's part: the PCB board. As you might expect from a former Intel engineer, Dean Goedde has done a great job of PCB design. Neat trace layouts, good noise protection and robust components. The board is based on a 5Mhx Parallax Propeller chip, with 8 cores. It has a differential pressure sensor for speed and a single pressure sensor for altitude. It also has 512k of on-board memory in addition to that in the Propeller chip. Click on the photo and you'll be taken to Flickr, where you can mouse over the components to find out what they are AttoPilot board top And here's the bottom of the board. Click on this one, too, to find out what the components are: AttoPilot board bottom
Tags: attopilot
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Comments

  • VoiceOfReason April 5, 2009 at 6:33pm
    I'm pretty sure I get the site concept, and how Dean designed his board is indeed relevant and instructive to a group trying to make their own autopilots. But that isn't why he sells his product. That is why it falls into the reverse engineering category, and why I think (not speaking for him) that he is entitled to be bothered by the dissection.

    That's o.k.! You are well within your rights (I believe) to do this. But there is also no harm in acknowledging that it was a baby step at a reverse engineering process so that others could possibly use this route in their own DIY quests. And that when Dean sells someone an autopilot, that isn't the intended use.

    I'm not trying to start a fire here. You're right, I should get one and test it myself and contribute. This site isn't about product reviews to help inform consumers, it is a hobbyist site, and I have benefited from the information on it so I should probably give back. For right now though, I'm going to slink back to the back row of the class now if I may :)
  • 3D Robotics
    Chris Anderson April 5, 2009 at 6:01pm
    VoR, I think you're confused about the point of this site. It's "DIY" drones, for people who want to learn how to make their own autopilots. How Dean designed his board is relevant and instructive, not "nosy".

    As is clear from Part 1 and Part 2, this review is coming out in several parts. We'll get to performance and flight comparisons later. I fully expect AttoPilot to vastly outperform ArduPilot (as one would expect from the 5x difference in price). If you've been paying attention here, you'll know that we are the huge AttoPilot supporter.

    At any rate, I invite you to review AttoPilot yourself here. You can do it your own way, and take as little or as much room as you want. If, after our review series is finished, you think we've missed something, please feel free to add it yourself. We're just the hosts here, but the community makes the site.
  • VoiceOfReason April 5, 2009 at 5:45pm
    I wouldn't apologize if I were you Dean. Remember, the DIY guys are biased...they have their own "baby" that they are promoting. A product review looks at product features and compares marketing claims to real performance. If you do 50Hz updates and everyone else does 10 Hz updates, then that is a feature worthy of review. How you physically do it only matters to people looking to reverse engineer your hard work for their benefit.

    A flight test comparison looking at performance on the same airframe between Attopilot and Ardupilot or other unit would be a real review that would be worthy of discussion.

    This was just people being nosy about what is under the hood, and I think its natural to be a little miffed.
  • Dean April 4, 2009 at 9:57pm
    And - my apologies... I am EXTREMELY sensitive about my baby. I am almost out of my first stock of units (4 left, yeah!) but need to sell many more to get out of debt. I have almost ruined myelf financially to get this to market. I resisted releasing it sooner because documentation was not up to snuff, and that part of it is still rough, but then here comes the tax man, so I started sales with the knowledge that for these first units I'll be forced to give more direct 1:1 support to customers.

    BTW - I have no plans to make paper manuals... it is all .pdf and people can print out selected pages if they feel the need. Save a tree!
  • 3D Robotics
    Chris Anderson April 4, 2009 at 9:52pm
    For those of you who may be confused by this comment chain, I've got one of the first AttoPilots that went out and this should not be considered the final version. There is no paper documentation with the product at all at this stage (obviously most commercial products come with the warranty in the box) and the documentation on the supplied SD card is still unfinished. But the hardware is first class and you can expect the rest to follow suit shortly.
  • Dean April 4, 2009 at 9:41pm
    Of course warranty is part of the product. But, would you pay for replacement of a product you sell to someone if they had taken it apart? This is why I worded the warranty/liability form the way I did. At $800, I'm making small $ after you add up all my costs, components, assembly and paranoid quadruple checking of everything.

    The warranty/liability signing is not "pre-sale", it is part of the sale process. Autopilot = weapons technology... thus I get people to sign a form before I sell.
  • Michael April 4, 2009 at 9:31pm
    Dean,

    It is a great product and I am wondering if you anticipated the likely hood of people reverse engineering it? Perhaps a Chinese company may get its hands on one and pump them out for a quarter the price? Is there anything you can do to stop this? I know there are patents and trademarks for protection, however, these are pretty useless when your dealing with China.

    Michael
  • 3D Robotics
    Chris Anderson April 4, 2009 at 9:13pm
    Ah, my apologies. I thought the warranty would be part of the product. I'd forgotten about the pre-sale signing process.

    Don't worry, the next posts in the review are coming right up. And as for the stripdown, we do that for everything. It's pretty much standard in the gadget review industry (see our GadgetLab for examples). This is par for the course--we do it to Apple, too!
  • Dean April 4, 2009 at 9:06pm
    It is item 6 in the Warranty/Liability form you signed and faxed to me... I am holding it in my hand.

    I'd just rather have a public reverse-engineer or dissection be on a PicoPilot or something I'm not depending on to help make my mortgage payments. Sorry for the downer here... I just didn't expect this type of evaluation. I was hoping you would install it and go right to the evaluation of how easy you feel it is to setup, tune, and use.
  • 3D Robotics
    Chris Anderson April 4, 2009 at 8:16pm
    "..a person voided their warranty by taking the Atto out of the case."

    Actually, nothing in the documentation says that the warranty is voided if Attopilot is taken out of the case. In fact nothing in the documentation says anything about a warranty at all. Maybe there isn't one? ;-)

    [Note: I'm just kidding. The documentation isn't finished and I'm sure this is something that will get in the final versions.]
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